Lucifer's Hammer

His desk was buried in paper. His hair was cut very short, his mustache was neatly trimmed and thin as a razor’s edge. He wore what his ex-wife had called his engineering uniform: khaki trousers, khaki shirt with epaulets, khaki bush jacket with more epaulets; pocket calculator swinging from his belt (when his hair was all brown it had been a slide rule), pencils in his breast pockets, notebook in its own pocket sewed to the jacket. When forced to — as he increasingly was by court appearances, command performances before the Mayor of Los Angeles and its Commissioners of Water and Power, testimony before Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the State Legislature — he reluctantly put on a gray fla

His coffee cup was empty, dead empty, and there went his last excuse. He keyed the intercom. “Dolores, I’m ready for our visiting firemen.”

“Not here yet,” she said.

Reprieved. For a little while. He went back to his papers, hating what he was doing. As he worked he muttered to himself. “I’m an engineer, dammit. If I’d wanted to spend all my time with legal briefs or sitting in a courtroom, I’d have been a lawyer. Or a mass murderer.”

Increasingly he regretted taking the job. He was a powersystems man, and a damned good one; he’d proved that by becoming Pe

Dolores came in with more urgent memos that had to be answered. Every one of them was a job for a public-relations type, and every one of them came from people important enough to demand the time of the supervising engineer. He hefted the stack of memoranda and documents she dropped into his IN basket. “Look at this crap,” he said. “And every bit of it from politicians.”

She winked. “Illegitimi non carborundum,” she said.

Barry winked back. “It ain’t easy. Di

“Sure.”

He felt the anticipation from the bright promise in her quick smile. Barry Price sleeps with his secretary! I suppose, he thought, I suppose the Department would get upset if they knew. And to hell with them.

He felt the quiet: The building should be humming with the faint vibrations of turbines, the feel and sound of megawatts pouring into the grid, feeding Los Angeles and its industries; but there was nothing. Below him was the rectangular building that contained the turbines, beautiful machines, a paean to man’s ingenuity, weighing hundreds of tons and balanced to micrograms, able to spin at fantastic speeds and not vibrate at all… Why couldn’t people understand? Why didn’t everyone appreciate the beauty of fine machinery, the magnificence?

“Cheer up,” Dolores said, reading his thoughts. “The crews are working. Maybe this time they’ll let us finish.”

“Wouldn’t that make the news?” Barry asked. “Actually, I’d rather it didn’t. The less publicity we have, the better off we are. And that’s crazy.”

Dolores nodded and went to the windows. She stared across the San Joaquin Valley toward the Temblor Range thirty miles away. “Haze out there,” she said. “One of these days…”

“Yes.” That was a cheerful thought. Southern California had to have power, and with natural-gas shortages the only ways were coal and nuclear — and there was no way at all to burn coal and not get some haze and smog. “We’ve got the only clean way to go,” Barry said. “And we’ve won every time the public got to vote. You’d think even lawyers and politicians would get the message.” He knew he was preaching to the converted, but it helped to talk to someone, anyone, who would be sympathetic, who understood.

A light went on at his desk and Dolores flashed a parting smile before hastening out to greet the visiting delegation from the State Assembly. Barry prepared for another long day.

Morning rush hour in Los Angeles: streams of cars, all moving, thin smell of smog and exhaust fumes despite last night’s Santa Ana wind; patches of morning mist from the coast dying as warmer winds from inland swept them away. There was this about the morning rush hour: The freeways were jammed, but not necessarily with idiots. Most drove the same route at the same time every morning. They knew the ropes. You could see it at the off ramps, where nobody had to swerve across lanes; and at the on ramps, where the cars seemed to take turns.

Eileen had noticed it more than once. Despite the stand-up comics who had made California drivers the joke of the world, they were much better on freeways than any people she had seen anywhere else — which meant that she could drive with half her attention. She knew the ropes, too.

Her routine seldom varied now. Five minutes to finish a last cup of coffee before she got to the freeway. Stow the cup in the little rack she’d got from J. C. Whitney, and use the hairbrush for another five minutes. By then she was awake enough to do some real work. It would take another half-hour to get to Corrigan’s Plumbing Supplies in Burbank, and she could get a lot done with the dictaphone in that time. It improved her driving, too. Without the dictaphone she would be tense and nervous, pounding the dash in helpless frustration at every minor trafiic jam.

“Tuesday. Get on Corrigan’s back about the water filters,” her voice said back to her. “We’ve had two customers install the damned things without knowing there were parts missing.” Eileen nodded. She’d taken care of that already, and smoothed out the rage of a guy who’d looked like a barge tender and turned out to be related to one of the biggest developers in the valley. It just went to show, you could never kiss off a deal just because it looked like a one-item sale. She hit the rewind, then recorded: “Thursday. Have the warehouse people check every one of those filters in stock. Look for missing Leed nuts. And send a letter to the manufacturer.” She returned to PLAYBACK.

Eileen Susan Hancock was thirty-four years old. She was on the thin side of very pretty, and the reason showed in her hands, which were always in motion, and in her smile, which was nice, but which flashed always too suddenly, as if she’d turned on a light bulb, and in her walk. She had a tendency to leave people behind.

Somebody had once told her that was symbolic: She left people behind both physically and emotionally. He hadn’t said “intellectually,” and if he had she wouldn’t have believed him, but it was largely true. She’d been determined to be something more than a secretary long before there was anything like a women’s rights movement; and she’d managed that despite the responsibilities of a younger brother to raise.

If she ever talked about it, she laughed at how trite the situation was: Older sister puts younger brother through college but can’t go herself; helps younger brother get married, but never marries herself; and none of it was really true. She’d hated college. Maybe, she sometimes thought (but never said to anyone), a very good college, a place where they make you think, maybe that would have worked out. But to sit in a classroom while a timeserver lectured from a book that she’d already read, to teach her nothing she didn’t already know — it had been sheer hell, and when she dropped out the reasons weren’t financial.